Where does the word "bankrupt" come from? Simply looking at the word, one associates "bank" with the root "rupt", as in rupture, corrupt, abrupt. But the origin actually has more to do with the Ponte Vecchio, the famed medieval bridge in Florence, Italy than it does with a ruptured bank. The Ponte Vecchio was first erected in Roman times and rebuilt in 1345. Since the existence of the bridge, it has hosted shops and merchants who displayed their wares on a table, or banco. If a merchant could not pay his debts, the bench would be physically broken, rotto, by soldiers. This practice was called bancorotto, literally "broken table". Without a table, the merchant would be unable to sell his wares and was thus out of business. The French equivalent of bancorotto was banqueroute, and it is from this that English took the word in the sixteenth century and changed it into its modern form of bankrupt. So, historically speaking, the word bankrupt has more in common with a broken table on the Ponte Vecchio than it does with a ruptured bank. See also Merriam Webster Online Dictionary and http://encyclopedia.laborlawtalk.com/Ponte_Vecchio Ray Ivey